1. In William Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors,” Antipholus states, “I to the world am like a drop of water/ That in the ocean seeks another drop.” He is in the midst of losing his identity and seeks a stabilizing figure, his brother.
2. Walt Whitman’s famous and provocative lines from his poem “I Sing the Body Eclectic:” “Ebb stung by the flow, and flow stung by the ebb—love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching”
3. Allen Ginsberg’s beat poem “Howl,” exclaiming furious sex, “Who copulated ecstatic and insatiate”
4. In his poem “The Indifferent,” John Donne writes, “I can love her, and her, and you, and you…Venus heard me sigh this song/ And by love’s sweetest part, variety, she swore”
5.Echoes Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” where in the Wife of Bath’s story a knight must learn the secret of what women want in order to be acquitted for rape. He meets a fairy who teaches him the secret, that women desire “sovereynetee/ As wel over hir housbond as hir love/ And for to been in maistrie hym above.”
6. In Sonnet 116, Shakespeare writes, “Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds”
7. In the “Fourth Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor” from “Arabian Nights,” Sinbad is buried alive with his dead wife, as is custom in the savage land in which he travels. He becomes a hero by escaping, following a small light.
8. In John Keats’ famous poem “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” he writes, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”
9. In Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” Una is a beautiful princess that represents truth.
10. Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of beauty.
11. Narcissus, in Greek mythology, fell in love with his own reflection, and, not wanting to leave its sight, died.
12. Charity, here personified, stands for loving, kindness, and giving.
13. William Wordsworth writes in his famous “Ode: Intimations on Immortality,” “In primal sympathy/ Which having been must ever be”